Jefferson Park: Ethnicity
At the age of 4, my family and I moved from our small apartment in Korea Town to a beautiful and quiet neighborhood named Jefferson Park.
Where everyone in this neighborhood was very friendly. We lived in a small, circled street named Rochester Circle. It was named after a very famous radio and television comedian, Eddie Anderson, well known as “Rochester”. He was known to be the first African American who had a regular role in the radio and television industry for 30 years.
My family and I moved into a two-bedroom house right next to his beautiful two-story mansion which he had built on 1941. At the time that we moved into that neighborhood my family and I were the only Hispanic family that lived in that street. All of our neighbors were African Americans, they were elderly yet the kindest neighbors ever. The closest Hispanic family that lived in our neighborhood was a block away.
Throughout the years of living in Jefferson Park I’ve noticed a lot of white people started moving into our neighborhood, which was very weird to all of us. We have never seen white people come through our neighborhood.
A lot of people have been buying and remodeling houses to sell them for triple the price. Many of our old friends that we’ve gone to elementary school with had moved out of their homes because their parents can no longer afford the rent. As well there has been many renovations in our community. Most of our neighbors rent their houses for tourists to stay in, including Rochester’s mansion, it is now known as Anderson’s Estates.
As I had mentioned before throughout the years that I’ve been living in Jefferson Park I feel like colored people are slowly getting kicked out of our neighborhood and it’s being done by raising the house prices. The cost of most of these houses are now a million dollars. Most of these people can barely afford the rent including my parents, a minimum wage job here in Los Angeles is not enough to cover expenses.
How is my neighborhood going to look like after a couple of months or when COVID-19 is over? Are the rest of my neighbors or my family still going to be living in this neighborhood in a year?
When it comes to news, I don’t watch it on television anymore, I always follow the news on Twitter, Spectrum News 1. I don’t like watching the news on TV because I feel like all they talk about is COVID-19 or have to hear the nonsense that Donald Trump had said on that day. On Twitter I get to see what I want to read about and skip something that I don’t want to read, unlike my parents they watch the news. My community is not well covered in local news, all they talk about is the crime that occurs, which rarely happens, instead they should cover how the local programs help those in need.
